The BBC’s iPlayer website will be available globally starting next year. Fans of Dr. Who and Top Gear will finally be able to watch BBC programming directly from the web. Currently, BBC programming is limited to residents of the UK who must pay a yearly television-licensing fee. When you try to watch a program from outside the UK you are greeted with a message saying “Not available in your area.” The BBC has not committed to an exact launch date, only stating that it will be sometime “next year.”

The BBC Trust is still deciding whether to charge viewers a fee per episode or to use advertising to generate income. Hopefully, they will follow in Hulu’s footsteps and make their programming available for free with modest advertising.

John Smith, the chief executive of BBC Worldwide, said, “it would open up the ‘under-exploited’ market for UK shows, such as Top Gear and Doctor Who.” The BBC would be wise to launch the iPlayer website soon after the holiday season when people are more likely to be indoors watching online programming.

Owning a television and watching programs in the UK is very different from other parts of the world. Every household must pay a licensing fee to legally watch televised programming. Officials go to great lengths to ensure that every house is in compliance, even making random inspections at times. These licensing fees cannot be collected outside the UK and because of this BBC programming has been limited to UK residents only.

With viewers transitioning from the television screen to the computer screen, it’s good to see television networks like the BBC keeping up with the changing needs of their viewers. Hopefully, the BBC iPlayer’s next stop will be on the Apple TV.

The tv licence fee isn't really in correlation with the BBC iplayer. The fee if paid per house hold, you pay if you have any device that can receive a tv signal. So if you have a tv in your house you will already pay it. We don't pay any additional fee for the iPhone app (or nokia ps3 etc) but I'm guessing because it will be accessible outside the UK and they won't pay the household licence BBC them selves may charge for their services. This post was a little misleading in that license fee malarky.. It's a government tax we pay for tv services in general, not limited to just the iplayer app..

He already said it: VPN. People outside the US can use it to enjoy netflix and Hulu too.

VPN=Virtual Private Network using PPtP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol). It's usually used to connect to a corporate network from home or abroad to access all the same resources on the remote network that you would have if you were plugged in locally, such as shares on other network PCs. It does this by creating a virtual network adapter (NIC) so your computer appears to be on both a public network (the Internet) and a private network (the office) at the same time when, in reality, the private network is connecting over the public network (the Internet) using an encrypted "tunnel." It has been used to connect to the Internet THROUGH the Internet just as easily, so your virtual network adapter will get a public routable IP address from another country and all traffic is routed through a VPN server in that country. Because it's encrypted, they can't tell where you, the end user, really is unless your VPN host blabs.

You can set up your own VPN server but you'd have to have a friend in another country who can host it for it to do any good, which is why there are paid VPN services. They are more often used for P2P in so that the MPAA can't trace an IP address back to you. Someone sets up a VPN in a country with lax enforcement and they start signing people up.